Gardens

So I've been thinking about gardening because it's spring, I'm hopeful around this time.  I look for inspiration, being sucked in by all the seed catalogs and an unwillingness to accurately match the time it takes to garden with how much time I have available.  In looking at various blogs and forum kind of gardenporn, I'm struck by a term I've run across.  Show me a real garden. Hmmm.

What is a real garden?  Well my garden is one.  It has a stick pile and compost bins and no grass in the backyard.  Would looking at this inspire someone to garden?  No.  It looks like it needs work.  It does.  It's in its post-winter mess.  No ideas could be gleaned from it right now.  It's a mess.

My house is a mess too.  I don't see decorating  sites ever wanting to show me real rooms. Would anyone know what color the walls are when stacks of books are sitting on the floor?  Can you see the countertop in the kitchen for the dirty dishes?  Would a "real room" have any kind of a life in a decorating magazine?  Well no.  The elements which make you want to beautify your life are being obscured by your life.  You have to see the elements in the room to get the idea that yellow and blue really can look less twee than you thought.

The same is true in my garden.  One year the baby's breath and the roses bloomed together.  It was a giant rose bouquet from the florist in my garden.  It was a real garden.  But it was blooming and clean and if I do say so myself, breathtaking.  I'd hoped for it.  But who knew?  And at that point, it was worth showing to anybody.  Before that it was a bunch of green.  No one could imagine what it was gonna do.  And it would have been a real oh yeah I see ya planted roses moment.  Maybe they'll bloom.  

My winter squash making its own way across the all the beds to the edge of the property was a real moment too.  It was the funniest thing I'd ever seen.  And beautiful.  But only because the garden around it was cleared enough to show the squash.  Before its travel, it was a vine in a bed.  Oh yeah ya got squash.

Most people don't wanna see the construction or the weeding or the blueprints.  Real gardens, real rooms, real food for that matter make an impact when they do what they are supposed to do.  Otherwise it's pretty much watching paint dry or watching grass grow.